Restaurant chain P.F. Chang's China Bistro got hacked recently, compromising thousands of credit cards. Oopsies. But business doesn't stop just because you got hacked, so in the short term the company is resorting to some old-school tech so that it can keep taking plastic.

Earlier this week, Brian Krebs reported that thousands of credit cards linked to the restaurant had shown up on the black market, and yesterday, the company confirmed the breach. While P.F. Chang's works with banks and law enforcement to figure out just what happened, it's taken steps to ensure it can safely keep the lights on, and that means taking credit cards the old-fashioned way. According to the PFC statement:

P.F. Chang's has already reported this incident to the card companies. We provided manual credit card imprinting devices to all P.F. Chang's China Bistro branded restaurants in the continental U.S. to prevent any further potential exposure of our guests' credit and debit card information.

It's amusing to think of a company that does revenues of over $1 billion per year resorting to 40-year-old technology like this. It's so slow! How would you even react if a waiter came over to your table with one of those machines? Still, it should serve as a reminder that the infrastructure our retail economy rests on is fragile, and when something goes wrong we can get blasted into the 1970s overnight. [Security Week, P.F. Chang's, Krebs on Security]